What is OKR?

I got to know about this term when I was working as a junior product developer at Freshworks Inc but I never really realized it’s importance when Saurabh, my manager that time, had asked me to write my OKR for the quarter. If you are wondering what OKR is? It’s Objectives and Key Results. Well, that doesn’t give you a lot of information. Let me explain what I understood.

It’s a buzzword like agile development, now in any tech company. OKR is a simple metric that Andy Grove followed during his leadership at Intel to track progress. Years later adopted by Google, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and many other companies. This could be used to track the progress of a personal goal as well and that’s is exactly what I am hoping to do.

OKR is a measure by which you can track progress. It is not a silver bullet, it cannot substitute for a sound judgment, strong leadership or innovative thinking but if they were present, OKRs will guide you in the right direction. An objective is something that the company/individual is striving towards, for Google, it is organizing all the information in the world. For me, it’s to get a job on graduating school. Key Results(KRs) are tasks that you track that will help you achieve the objective defined previously. KRs evolve as you get work done. Objective spreads across years but key results are time bound and binary, you either meet the requirements for KR or you don’t. KRs are structured such a way that on achieving all the KRs, the main objective is accomplished. If you find yourself short of your objective even after completing all your KRs, then you had just started of with a poor OKR structure.

If it’s still not clear, this should probably clear it. John Doerr, one of the initial investors in Google, worked in Intel when Andy Grove was the CEO and he learned about OKR during his time there. Here’s how he introduced Google to OKRs — He started his presentation on OKR by explaining how to define Objectives and Key Results. He then explained it with the following example

Objective: Build a planning model for Google. Measured by

Key Results:

1. Finish Presentation on time

2. Create a sample set of Google OKRs

3. Gain the management’s agreement to try out OKRs for three months.